The King's Fund: Five relationships that are essential to successfully managing the elective backlog (4 April 2022)

Summary

Now that the national plan to tackle the elective backlog is public, thoughts will be turning to how to achieve the challenging task ahead. A week before the plan was published, the King's Fund held a roundtable, supported by Novartis, with local health care leaders to discuss just that.

The overwhelming theme from this discussion was that effective communication within local systems will be essential to success. The national strategy has set out the ambition, but ultimately solutions will be implemented locally. Five relationships stood out as being vital.

1. Local areas and their neighbours.
2. Primary and secondary care.
3. Leaders and their workforce.
4. NHS and patients.
5. Local systems and their data.